Guess we're preparing for a full on heist now

Anubis nodded, glancing to Wings and giving it that mental command to Go. And the flying pitch rat does so, reaching forward and gripping the mushroom bomb in its front legs, grabbing the torch in its jaws as Anubis instructs it to, and taking off into the darkness of the pit, anxiety building with every flap of its wings.

Anubis, meanwhile, remained at the entrance, eyes wide and waiting, following the light of the torch with his eyes, moving his mental consciousness to that of his familiar and weaving them together for a short time, waiting for the moment for the beast to strike. As soon as it did, Anubis would give the command - drop the bomb, hopefully right in its jaws or right on its face, so that the thin shell of the fungus would break and spill all their delightfully sleepy contents right into the monster's senses.

(Unfortunately, the bat was just a little too jumpy, and gripped tighter at the mushroom the longer it flew. It was probably about to get eaten.)

Long moments passed as the flickering firelight's comparatively tiny glow swept to and fro over the old Pit's sandy floor. There were things to note, here.

Like old, dark stains in the sand. And large, misshapen tracks.

But beyond that? There was only an eerie silence, and dust motes drifting in the firelight.

Which begged the question: if the beast was not in the Pit, then... where was it?

Aran watches as the makeshift bomb is carried out to the pit, watching as the bat looks for their target. It's... Awfully quiet in there, he notes. Maybe the beast is asleep? Is it so confident that it would ignore their entrance? Hooves (and bird claws) are quite loud on stone, Aran should've alerted the thing just by being inside.

He waits some more... It's still quiet. The wingbeats of the bat didn't wake it?

....Is the beast even in here?

The idea of it being missing is startling, even if Aran is already prepared to fight. He looks at Anubis, what does the coyote think? The light down there is showing nothing inside, but there's plenty of areas the firelight does not touch.

He uses his magic, selecting a specific spell. One of the ones that allows him to see things he cannot - where is it?

The creature was not close by. Maybe a stronger cast of the spell might work, or maybe it was farther out in the ruins.

But Aran would notice something.

It wasn't out of place, exactly--or it might not be for him: the flicker of heartbeats here and there, miniscule, hiding in the walls, and above, below, to the sides. In tunnels, most likely, though these weren't visible themselves. Rats? Mice? Just Lesser prey.

Perhaps Anubis would find this of interest. The place had, after all, been wholly abandoned when first he'd arrived. It was no great mystery; simply Lessers colonizing the now-open Prisons, a dark haven with plenty of fresh water hidden below the surface.

And a food source, perhaps, for a predator.

Anubis stared through the eyes of the familiar, looking around, and finding...nothing. Silence. Darkness. Emptiness. His heart jumped in his chest and he blinked back into his body and swiftly turned towards Aran, with panic rising in his chest. "It's not here. It's gotten out. We need to be careful, we need to find it."

Just as he commanded Wings to fly lower, assuring it that the creature was probably not here, but just to make sure, Anubis himself reached out with his magic. He knew where the mycelium was in these caves, he had grown a significant amount himself. He reached out to search through the many glowing mushrooms scattered throughout these tunnels, looking for signs of disturbance from a larger creature, or even active movement that they might detect. Anything to give them a clue of where it is.

So Anubis has realized it too. His cast wasn't strong enough to show him everything in the area, the heartbeats detected were.... In the walls? Not big enough to be the giant beast that was supposed to be down there. Aran isn't sure how much life is in this prison normally, but it seems to be a normal amount for a general area.

"There's a lot of small heartbeats in the area." he says.

Just in case it matters. Still, it's not what the two of them are looking for. This is not something the two of them were prepared for. "How big is the prison?" Anubis lives here, he should know.

Aran needs to know what they're working with. If the place is big they could just use spells to locate it over and over - assuming one of them casts a spell strong enough. But if it's too big, they might miss small details that they need to find. It's a difficult situation to be in.

They are the prey - and in Aran's case, literally - and the beast is the predator. Is it hunting them, or simply gone? Aran pulls his magic to see one more time.

Nothing in the slight drifts of fungus that had begun to colonize this place gave any hint of passing air--nothing close, at least. Perhaps with a stronger cast.

Aran's final check with his magic offered new results. The spell was stronger, this time. Here were the myriad little beating hearts, again: and one larger.

One... much larger.

It was not ahead of them, in the darkness of the pit. It wasn't confined, here. It never had been. Only the crush of collapsed pillars back in the long halls had stopped it once before.

Right now, it was not behind them, lurking the halls. It was behind them--a fact that might shock Aran just a little--but it was below them, too, and very distant. The prison was more than its single floor, and somehow, this beast was down beneath. It was moving, but slowly, in no focused manner. Searching for something, perhaps.

Or hunting.

He felt nothing, no disturbance, no movement, so he pulled back with a quiet curse. He had been wrong - the beast wasn't confined to the Pit and he was amazed that Bacchus and his "children" had lasted so long without being hunted. Well, perhaps they had been. He hadn't checked up on them in a while and they hadn't darkened the entrance to his lab for some time.

More reason to do something about this creature, so that he might have the privacy he craved, one day.

He looked to Aran. "I can't find it. Can you sense it anywhere? It hasn't passed any of the growths on this level of the prison." As he spoke, Wings was circling back, the light it carried in its mouth still burning, the mushroom bomb still clutched in its front paws. It landed next to Anubis and gave a questioning thought - what was it supposed to do? Anubis simply shrugged it off - wait, for now. And so it did, setting down its package and sitting back while the Greaters talked.

Aran waits for the spell to fully capture everything around them. The same small heartbeats as before, and another... One much larger, stronger - but not where Anubis or Aran thought it would be. He's not surprised that the beast is not trapped - that much was gathered by the two of them being unable to locate it in the first place.

Aran almost doesn't want to move - the feeling of something much stronger nearby has him worried. Instead of giving in, Aran turns to face the coyote. "It's both behind us and underneath. Either it broke free or had more escape routes to begin with."

This almost feels like a trap, but why go through so much work to trap someone like Aran? Anubis most likely also had no idea, based on his reactions. "What should we do?" He'll leave the important decisions to Anubis.